Building and Banking for Impact - Blake Jones of Namaste Solar
How do you create a culture of mutual respect and autonomy in an operating business?
My guest this week on "Socially Responsible Business" was Blake Jones, co-founder of Namaste Solar, Clean Energy Credit Union, AND Kachuwa Impact Fund.
And while we covered a lot of topics - including banking with an institution that uses your deposits to fund clean energy projects instead of oil pipelines* - here was my favorite thing:
In the early days at Namaste, there was a very loose rule "ask someone else if they think it's a good idea, and if they agree, do it!" This instilled an "owner's mindset" among all the early team members (who actually were owners, since Namaste is a cooperative) and helped them to navigate some really ambiguous situations in the early days of residential solar.
Eventually, someone did something that was a bad idea - even after someone else told them it was a bad idea.
What caught my attention is how Blake responded, when I asked him how they handled that inevitable human behavior:
"When those times happen you press pause, and you get everyone into a room and you talk about it, and maybe you come up with a new paradigm or a new policy, or a new practice. And when you're a rapidly growing company, that's what you need to do anyway, regardless of what kind of structure you've got, because things are changing so quickly. And the solar industry was changing quickly. So it wasn't just things internally with our rapidly growing company. It was also the outside marketplace was changing. So yes, you've got to adapt to that. But I would argue, you have to do that with any structure that you choose."
What they did was treat everyone like an owner, and focus on culture over hierarchy and documentation. I can imagine how much more care and thoughtfulness Namaste got from that approach over trying to "policy" everyone to death.
Find the full episode at VoiceAmerica.com, or wherever you get your podcasts (all linked from the right side of that page).
Blake Jones is a self-described “cooperative geek” and is a co-founder of numerous cooperatives such as: (1) Namasté Solar, an employee-owned cooperative and certified B-Corp solar company with 225+ team members; (2) Clean Energy Credit Union, a federally chartered credit union that has provided 12,000+ clean energy loans totaling $225M+; (3) Amicus Solar Cooperative, a purchasing cooperative and certified B-Corp with 70+ member-companies; and (4) Kachuwa Impact Fund, an investment cooperative with a $30M+ evergreen portfolio of impact investments. Blake is a 2010 Ernst & Young “Entrepreneur of the Year” award recipient and has a BE in Civil Engineering from Vanderbilt University.
